Origin

A camera was first a council or legislative chamber in Italy and Spain. The word is borrowed from Latin, where it meant ‘vault or chamber’, and is also the source of chamber (Middle English). In legal contexts the Latin phrase in camera is used to mean ‘in the judge's private chamber’ instead of in open court. The photography sense comes from the camera obscura (literally ‘dark chamber’), a device popular in the 18th century for recording visual images—the first example of the modern sense comes in the 1840s.